Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Ubuntu meets ASUS F3Sa

As I mentioned in my previous entry I'm working on getting Ubuntu installed on my ASUS F3SA-A1 laptop. Initially I had some problems with the discs, I kept getting errors. I finally resolved this by burning the disc with ISORecorder on the laptop under Vista. The install appeared to have smoothly at first, but there were two major problems: the video and audio drivers.

The screen resolution was 1024x786 not the full wide screen resolution. Upon further investigation this was due to the fact that XF86 was using the vesa drive instead of the ATI Radeon driver. After several failed attempts I finally got it working using ENVY a handy little utility that can help you install ATI and NVidia drivers for XF86.

The next issue was getting the sound to work. I'm still working on getting it to work completely but so far I've at least gotten it working via a suggestion from Luke Hollins to set model=lenovo in the alsa-base file which doesn't make a whole lot of sense but it works. I haven't tested the mic yet. The speakers work but not the headphone jack. I'll have had a chance to test the micphone yet.

I've been installing Linux since 1995 and found Ubuntu to be the easiest install so far. It feels a lot more responsive than the previous install of Vista on this computer. I was even able to get a few windows applications installed with Wine. I'll post more about that later.

At this point the todo's are as follows:
  • Finger Print reader
  • WebCam
  • Explore the TurboMemory options

Friday, February 1, 2008

ASUS Laptop Adventures

I've been looking for a new laptop for my wife for the past 6 months. I knew what I wanted for performance and what I wanted to pay. To problem was that the two concepts were not getting along until I finally spied an Asus F3sA-A1 from Newegg for $999 with a 15.4" screen, 2.2 Core 2 Duo (T7500), 1GB ram, 160GB drive, 512 Video Ram, Gigabit Ethernet, Wireless ABGN & bluetooth, & 1GB of Turbo memory. The memory was low but it came as only one stick so I could easily upgrade it to 3 which I did. The core features were there along with a few extras that I didn't require like N, Gigabit, and 512 video ram. I was looking for at least 128 video RAM. We'll have had the machine for almost a week and here are my adventures and reactions so far.

Initially I turned it on with 1G of ram just to see how Vista would perform. As expected there was a lot of swapping going on in the page file. The Windows Experience Index was around 4.5 because of the memory which is DDR2 667. When I upgraded the memory to 3GB it increased the index value to 4.7 which was the of everything except the processor which is 5.1. I finally dug around to try and figure out what this Tubro memory is and found it on Intel's website. It is a large cache of either 512MB or 1GB of SSD memory that helps the hard drive work more effectively.

Since my wife is willing using Linux and doesn't care for Vista. I started rummaging around to see how things were configured. I'm a debian fan so I first tried booting with Debian Edgy and it didn't find the network drivers out of the box which I thought was a problem that could be overcome by finding the right module but I thought this would be a good time to give Ubuntu a try. So I downloaded the Install/Live DVD from Ubuntu because I read on a blog that they got it to work with no problem on this laptop.

Next I started looking around at the partitions to see how they were configured. I found that there is a 6+ Gb at the beginning of the drive which I correctly assumed was for restorations. Since I purchased Vista I didn't want to get rid of this. I started searching for a partition backup solution. Initially I looked at Ghost because I was familiar with it. Since there were a bunch of bad reviews that I saw on Newegg. I returned to the open source options and found DriveXML & Clonezilla. DriveXML isn't open source but it is free and several reviews spoke highly of it. Initially I created a backup using this but the restore process looked cumbersome. That's when I stumbled upon Clonezilla which is based on a bunch of Open Source tools and a Debian live CD.

I downloaded the Clonezilla live CD which was less than 100MB. I used this to backup my OS partition and the hidden partition which it reported as vfat to the data partition. Next I transferred this to an external drive which I could have done initially but I didn't have access to it at the time.

Well back to the hardware. The laptop came with a finger printer reader which makes logins super simple. It also came with a few extras such as a nice little case, screen cleaning cloth, and small mouse. With Vista there are some excellent options available for adjusting the screen to your liking.

The biggest problem with the computer so far is the batter life. It only appears to have about 2 hours which is pretty unacceptable. But for the price and portability I was willing to sacrifice that for how my wife will be using the computer. It will mostly be a home computer that will be travelling on occasions.

At this point the machine is backed up and ready for the Ubuntu install. I'll post those in my next blog.